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To read and download the bibliography, you must either have Acrobat Reader or download it here.  |
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Writings about VSBA (download in .pdf format)
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Writings
by Robert Venturi ( .pdf 156 KB)
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| Writings
by Denise Scott Brown ( .pdf 128 KB)
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| Writings by Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi ( .pdf 136 KB) |
| Writings by Others at VSBA ( .pdf 100 KB) |
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| Full Bibliography (Including all documents above) ( .pdf 1.5 MB) |
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In Supercrit No. 2, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown revisit their infamous Learning from Las Vegas, which overturned the barriers separating high architecture from the commercial architecture of the Strip. You can get involved, hear the couple's project description, see the drawings, and join in the crit. This innovative text is an invaluable resource for any architecture student and an inspiring record and exploration of this fascinating project. (Adapted from Amazon synopsis) |
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Now, for the first time, these two observer-designer-theorists (Robert Venturi & Denise Scott Brown)
turn their iconoclastic vision onto their own remarkable partnership
and the rule-breaking architecture it has informed. The views of Venturi
and Scott Brown have influenced architects worldwide for nearly half
a century. Pluralism and multiculturalism; symbolism and iconography;
popular culture and the everyday landscape; generic building and electronic
communication are among the many ideas they have championed. Here,
they present both a fascinating retrospective of their life work and
a definitive statement of its theoretical underpinnings. Accessible,
informative, and beautifully illustrated, Architecture as Signs and
Systems is a must for students of architecture and urban planning,
as well as anyone intrigued by these seminal cultural figures. Venturi
and Scott Brown have devoted their professional lives to broadening
our view of the built world and enlarging the purview of practitioners
within it. By looking backward over their own life work, they discover
signs and systems that point forward, toward a humane Mannerist architecture
for a complex, multicultural society.
(from Amazon Review) |
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This is the catalog for an exhibition originating at the Philadelphia
Museum of Art and traveling to the Museum of Contemporary Art in La
Jolla, CA, and the Heinz Architectural Center in Pittsburgh. Brownlee
(art history, Univ. of Pennsylvania), David De Long (architecture,
Univ. of Pennsylvania), and Kathryn B. Hiesinger (curator of European
decorative arts, Philadelphia Museum of Arts) discuss the the accomplishments
of Venturi, Scott Brown, & Associates (originally Venturi, Rauch,
and Scott Brown), as well as relevant decorative arts, along with
drawings and color plates. Two of the most valuable sections are the
chronology and the project list, which includes 400 projects designed
by "Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and their associates" (sorry,
Rauch) between 1957 and 2000.
(from Amazon Review) |
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Von Moos' text, amply illustrated,
meticulously describes and catalogues the firm's evolution and work. This
book should provide a valuable reference to the work of a uniquely American
firm. |
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This new collection of writings argues for a generic architecture defined by
iconography and electronics, an architecture that has used meaning as shelter
and symbol. It is a call to architecture to recover its lost soul.
Venturi is known as an architect who communicates his architectural ideas,
formal and verbal, with grace and wit. In that sense, this book is vintage
Venturi. These essays, letters, reports, lectures, manifestos, and polemical
texts offer a candid, irreverent view from the drafting room - or, as he says, "commonsense responses, urgent and diverse, of a busy architect," who finds
himself bothered by the conceptualizing of architecture and the contamination of
the field by other disciplines. Seven of the essays were co-authored by Denise
Scott Brown. |
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Available at Amazon.com |
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Edited by Frederic Schwartz.
Here, Robert Venturi reflects on this seminal building from a distance
of over a quarter of a century. He discusses why its style and form, once
so revolutionary, are accepted now. Equally important, he reminisces about "how hard it was for me, as its author, to arrive at." This book presents
for the first time all of the developmental drawings that were executed
to accompany the six stages of the design. |
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On "Houses and Housing" illustrates
a great diversity in styles and commissions. Social housing, such as the
seminal Guild House or the oriental-inspired Chinatown Housing, are included,
as well as designs for individual residences. By focusing on houses as
luxuriant as the House in Connecticut alongside projects as 'ugly and
ordinary' as Brighton Beach Housing -- the competition entry in which
the term was in fact coined -- their range proves to be as wide as their
concept of 'home'. |
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Scott Brown's role in VSBA,
as an interdisciplinary, cross-continental link and a collaborator in
translating urban ideas into architectural terms, is not well known. In
these essays, which are in part autobiographical, she surveys the richness
of architectural and urbanistic thinking that has emerged from the "three
disciplines of three countries" of her professional and suggests that
urban ideas that are very meaningful to Venturi and Scott Brown could
be useful to others. At the end, the transcript of a panel discussion
after the Tate Gallery lecture reveals a fascinating confrontation between
British and American ways of seeing urbanism, with Scott Brown performing
what is perhaps her most useful function -- linking things together. |
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These seventeen essays span thirty-two years in the careers of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. In these careers one can see the inextricable blending of the building of buildings and the building of words. They "look, analyze, synthesize, through writing, synthesize through design, then look again." A leading exponent of the Postmodern, VSBA has been in the forefront of new approaches in architecture and design, combining traditional with modern. And their writing has been viewed as "brilliant and liberating."
This book continues the groundbreaking work begun in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture and Learning from Las Vegas. It is a remarkable accolade to the sustained brilliance of two minds and to the tradition they have advanced of thinking, writing, and building. |
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Learning from Las Vegas created a healthy controversy on its appearance in 1972,
calling for architects to be more receptive to the tastes and values of "common"
people and the commercial vernacular and less immodest in their erections of
"heroic," self-aggrandizing monuments. This revision includes the full texts of
Part I of the original, on the Las Vegas Strip, and Part II, "Ugly and Ordinary
Architecture, or the Decorated Shed," a generalization from the findings of the
first part on symbolism in architecture and the iconography of urban sprawl. |
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"I am especially pleased to
have had the wit to assert in [my original introduction] that Complexity
and Contradiction was 'the most important writing on the making of architecture
since Le Corbusier's Vers une Architecture of 1923.' What counts is that
this brilliant, liberating book was published when it was. It provided
architects and critics alike with more realistic and effective weapons,
so that the breadth and relevance which the architectural dialogue has
since achieved were largely initiated by it." - Vincent Scully, April,
1977. |
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The influential theories and powerful work of this esteemed international design firm are
documented in a concise, one-volume format. Architects and partners, the studio of
husband-and-wife team of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown has always believed that
good design is a collective endeavor, attaching very special value to the contributions of
the many renowned associates who have worked with them on notable projects. A full account
of their studio's brilliant collaborations comes alive in these pages.
(from Barnes & Noble Review)
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